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But again it was Laplace who solved the problem of the inequalities of Jupiter and Saturn by the theory of gravitation, reducing the errors of the tables from 20' down to 12", thus abolishing the use of empirical corrections to the planetary tables, and providing another glorious triumph for the law of gravitation.
M. Laplace coming to pay a few weeks' visit to my little domain, the governor said to him: "If you wish to find out your men you have only to apply to M. Gironiere no one will discover them if he do not; convey to him my orders to set out immediately in pursuit of them."
Let us now, after the example of Laplace, take from the standard tables the least considerable values, if you choose, of the expansions or contractions which solid bodies experience from changes of temperature; search then the annals of Grecian, Arabian, and modern astronomy for the purpose of finding in them the angular velocity of the moon, and the great geometer will prove, by incontrovertible evidence founded upon these data, that during a period of two thousand years the mean temperature of the earth has not varied to the extent of the hundredth part of a degree of the centigrade thermometer.
One wonders whether he is simply echoing the well-known phrase of Laplace, or whether he seriously believes that the non-existence of God is proved by the inability of the human eye to see Him! Nothing could be more unscientific one hates using that hackneyed expression, but there is no other than this confidence in the reliability of the senses.
He remarked that the error of this determination did not amount to one twentieth of the whole, whence it followed that the true value of the parallax could not exceed 8".2. Laplace, by an analogous process, determined the parallax to be 8".45. Encke, by a profound discussion of the observations of the transits of Venus in 1761 and 1769, found the value of the same element to be 8".5776.
The atheist will say, Wait a little. Some future Darwin will show how the simple forms came necessarily from inorganic matter. This is but another step by which, according to Laplace, "the discoveries of science throw final causes further back."
The process is, and always must be, the same; and precisely the same mode of reasoning was employed by Newton and Laplace in their endeavours to discover and define the causes of the movements of the heavenly bodies, as you, with your own common sense, would employ to detect a burglar.
Biologists have known for more than a century, since the work of Lavoisier and Laplace in 1780, that the fundamental process of the living mechanism is oxidation, and that this process is the same, as they said, for the burning candle and the guinea pig.
The primitive movement of rotation of the nebula is not connected with the simple attraction of the particles. This movement seems to imply the action of a primordial impulsive force. Laplace is far from adopting, in this respect, the almost universal opinion of philosophers and mathematicians.
Nor is this honour decreased by the ulterior and considerable improvements that the science has since received; even the discoveries of Lagrange and of Laplace have left this honour intact.
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